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The Irrelevant Ones: From Brazil to Baghdad

This piece is the fourth installment of a monthly series on legal immigrants for TheBlaze and The Chris Salcedo Show. What’s the intent of the series? To give relevance to the stories people who waited for their dream; people who came here the right way; the people who have gone above and beyond for their adopted country. Let’s tell their stories.

It was April 28th, 2003.

The teacher-turned-soldier sat in a schoolhouse in Fallujah, Iraq. He shook his head at the inconceivability of it all.

“How ironic,” he thought, “I’m a teacher, and here I am sitting in a school in Fallujah watching my buddies get hurt, and on my birthday, too.”

And, in an odd twist, April 28th was also Saddam Hussein’s birthday.

Far from his loved ones, Brazilian immigrant Túlio Tourinho was holed up in an Iraqi schoolhouse, advancing with the first infantry unit to cross the border into Iraq.

Like so many others, he spent those many months of deployment watching his first child’s first year unfold in precious snapshots.

Túlio was about a million miles away from anything he could have imagined. And yet it was exactly where he knew he needed to be.